Penance
by meganechan720
Summary: Life without fire is a cold life indeed. What if Aang came to regret letting Ozai live?
1. Air

**Penance**

_Life without fire is a cold life indeed. What if Aang came to regret letting Ozai live?_

* * *

><p><em>-Air<em>-

He'd only been twelve. Twelve years old. Not even old enough to shave. Aang looks down at the former Firelord, strings of gray hair hanging limply over his once proud face, and wonders if there is any way to undo the mistake he'd made fifteen years ago.

Even now he could never kill someone in cold blood, but as Ozai lifts his head to meet the Avatar's eyes, Aang wishes he'd had the guts to do it in the heat of battle. They stare at each other for a long time, nothing needing to be said, except for the final words Ozai always speaks before Aang leaves:

"Kill me, Avatar. Finish what you started fifteen years ago."

* * *

><p>At first Aang had responded with messages of peace, of mercy; protestations that he could never take a life. As he grew older and settled into life as the Avatar, his speeches turned into mere negations, a simple <em>No, I can't,<em> for the man who did nothing but roll his eyes at his childish philosophy.

After a while, though, Aang had stopped answering at all, and the eye roll had turned into a knowing smirk.

On the first anniversary of the battle he'd come to see the former Firelord for reasons he could not define even to himself. The next year he had returned for reasons just as opaque, and somehow it had turned into a yearly tradition. Every year since then had gone much the same: Ozai lifted his head and looked into his eyes, and Aang pretended to himself that he didn't see in them what he saw.

* * *

><p>Chi bending. A lost art, reborn in the long-lost Avatar. An art he had taught only a select few, the most skilled benders and purest of heart.<p>

An art he now taught no one.

Aang had done more that day than merely seal off Ozai's bending. He'd touched spirits with the man, seen into the deepest chamber of his heart, and Ozai had done the same. It wasn't really possible for two people to be more closely connected, and when Aang had finally realized that, it had made him shiver with a bone-deep cold. The look in Ozai's eyes told him that the man had always known.


	2. Water

-_Water_-

"Kill me, Avatar."

"Why?" he had asked finally, about five years into the tradition. The knowing smirk had flitted across Ozai's face, and he'd leaned back, meeting Aang's eyes, reminding him again (_always) _of the connection they shared.

"You don't even have a guess?" he'd asked in his silky smooth voice that grated against Aang's nerves like sandpaper.

"I don't understand why anyone would choose death when they could have life." At seventeen, he'd still meant it.

"Then you're a fool," Ozai had said, and that had been the end of the conversation for another year.

* * *

><p>At twenty, he understood.<p>

Katara's first child had been born still and silent, much as Yue had been, but they had been in the South Pole, and that night as Aang laid his first child into the cold water to join her ancestors he'd heard Sokka screaming at the night sky, though the moon had been hidden by clouds as a weeping maiden hides her face in her hands.

That year he met Ozai's eyes and didn't need to ask why.

* * *

><p>For the seven years after that, Aang had come to Ozai's prison cell and met his eyes for a specific reason. He still didn't know why he'd started the tradition, but now it had a clear purpose: penance.<p>

At twelve, taking a life for any purpose had seemed abhorrent, evil and wrong. His friends ate meat, and that was their choice, but to him all life was sacred. He'd borne more on his thin shoulders than most men ever do, but he'd never been truly alone, and he'd never felt life to be a burden, much less one too heavy to bear. But as he said goodbye to his daughter, he'd felt a desire, stronger than any he'd ever felt, to follow her under the water, and take a different, more final journey to the spirit world.

The strength of the desire, much less the existence of it, frightened him, and he'd clutched Katara to him tightly. Later as they worked through their grief she whispered to him that she'd felt the same desire when her mother died, and he felt a little better.

But looking into Ozai's eyes all he could remember was the feeling of drowning; drowning and being glad of it.

* * *

><p>He went hunting with Sokka and Hakoda once, after his second child, a boy, had been born healthy and screaming. He watched as the two men worked together to corral a turtle-seal away from the herd and then spear it. Sokka missed the vital spot he'd been aiming for and the animal cried out in pain. Aang's heart constricted to hear it, but what stole his breath was the answering look of pain on Hakoda's face, and he watched in awe as the man knelt tenderly next to the dying creature and slit its throat, apologizing for its unnecessary suffering as he did so. When it was dead father and son formally thanked the animal for its sacrifice and promised it that its flesh would nourish and enrich the lives of their clan, that its hide would be used to keep their people warm, and that its shell and bones would not go to waste.<p>

Aang didn't eat any of it, but he felt less horrified watching the others do so than he normally did.


	3. Fire

-_Fire_-

It was difficult to remember a time before he could bend the four elements, and even more difficult still to remember life before airbending. But he could, with effort, recall that there had been a time when the tiny heat of his firebending did not exist in himself. It seemed cold and sterile, less joyful than the exuberance of flame. He could, with a little more effort, imagine not having it anymore, and were it gone he would feel less himself, less than whole.

He can't even imagine what he's put Ozai through; Ozai, the man who valued power even above the lives of his own children. He'd thought the man heartless, but more accurate, he knows now, would be to say that his heart had been set upon the wrong things; and though Aang knows (_believes_) this judgment is accurate, he has also come to believe (_know_) that the moral value of a loss has no impact on the strength of its sting.

* * *

><p>Having felt that sting, Aang understands now that to show mercy is not always to spare a life. He regrets that he did not understand this fifteen years ago.<p>

But there is no way to kill Ozai now, and so he lives with a mark on his conscience borne of a deed that is worse than murder, and visits the man every year in a small, inadequate act of penance.

* * *

><p><em>This has been a pleasure to write. Thank you so much for your kind reviews! Each one meant a lot to me. <em>


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